It's finally here. After 12 years, 6 months, and 12 days on the market, Windows XP has hit its end of life. It will receive its last ever set of patches on Windows Update today, and for the most part, that will be that. Any flaws discovered from now on - and it's inevitable that some will be discovered - will never be publicly patched.

How bad is this going to be? It's probably going to be pretty bad. By some measures, about 28 percent of the Web-using public is still using Windows XP, and these systems are going to be ripe for exploitation.

I never liked Windows XP (I used BeOS during XP's early days, and Mac OS X and Linux during XP's later days), so I'm glad to see it go. This terrible operating system should have died out years ago.

I tried to use BeOS right after Windows 98, but it wouldn't let me install it on the shiny new AMD system I built back in 2002, because it only worked on Intel iron.

Sorry, but I have to call bullshit on that one. I have under my desk right now, an AMD Duron based machine from 2001 that runs BeOS quite happily. The integrated graphics aren't supported, but the ATI card I put in it works fine with an updated driver from BeBits. BeOS R5 always worked on AMD in my experience; the only limitations are too much RAM and too fast CPUs, and the latter can cause issues on Intel as well as AMD processors.